OT:Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Only when we are able to generate as much hydroelectric power per capita as Norway...

Norway has lots of hydropower, about half the population of London and about a fifth as much road length as the UK, despite the enormous length of the country. It's not exactly a typical country in terms of almost anything.

We haven't mentioned that other benefit that EVs (and some hybrids) have from making the heating/cooling independent of the engine. That is being able to go out to your car on a cold winter morning to find the windows de-frosted and dry and the inside nice and warm. Works best with at-home or on-street charging but also available with charging elsewhere (in which case it will use up a bit of range). Mine will run the air-con in advance too on a hot day. You can also trigger heating/cooling from the app, say if you're coming home on the train and your car is waiting in the station car park.

nib

Not if you do a thing called “planning”. It’s certainly involves a different mindset when doing long journeys and it’s adjusting to the new mindset that drivers of ICE cars seem to find hard.

Yes, long journeys will take longer in some EVs but many on the newer ones can manage very high speed charging and if you combine charging stops with coffee breaks (that you would have done anyway), the additional time can be minimised.

Tim

But it does happen. I've had:

Heading for a ferry to Ireland, being delayed by someone threatening to jump from a motorway bridge and me knowing that getting there late (we arrived with 8 minutes to spare, after a 235 mile drive), would have meant waiting for hours for a later crossing and hoping there was space.

Same trip,another time, same worries, when my wife had accidentally turned the volume down on my alarm/radio and we had set off hours late.

Same again with delays due to a motorway closure, also hoping that we'd make it in time and hoping, if not, that there was space on the next ferry and worrying about a long wait at the port and the crossing taking twice as long, as we had three under-5s in the car, so it would have been hell.

Other way, the ferry company having no-one answering phones overnight, during bad weather that had cancelled many ferries, and us trapped between leaving the house we were staying at in time to catch our ferry (but then being unable to return if the ferry was cancelled) and waiting for their office to open, so we'd know whether to set off. When we did get through, they'd brought the sailing FORWARD an hour and again we were in a mad rush.

We've also had phone calls telling us that a relative has died and that their funeral is the next day - too late to fly that night and too early in the day for the first flight of the next day ... so drive to Holyhead, cross on the ferry to Dublin, drive across Ireland to the funeral in Sligo (arriving with 15 minutes to spare), then to the cemetery, off for an hour at a family meal, drive to Belfast, cross to Cairnryan and drive back to Manchester.

I drive an EV, but not for such journeys.

We've also had holidays in Scotland, where we've stayed, centrally positioned, a couple of hour's drive in all directions from from places we were intending to visit. Staying in the countryside, with no chargers nearby and no charging facilities at the rented house. Again, a petrol car was essential, as we'd have needed to charge every day with the distances travelled - and that's a chunk out of each day if you can't charge overnight.

Some diesel vehicles can pre-heat the car with a timed or remotely controlled diesel heater.

Our EV has a stupid design. We can pre-heat it in winter, but there is no way to prevent the head and tail-lights coming on while it is heating, making it look like we are just about to pull out of our driveway, worrying passing drivers, cyclists and pedestrians ... particularly the latter, as until they pass the tree at the corner of our drive and are already right in front of the car, they cannot see into it.

Spoken like a true Gren.

'Its incredibly unlikely that the wind across all the UK will fall to zero on a dark winters night'

Mine doesn't do that. Mind you, the sound of the heat pump compressor going at full pelt is louder than some engines at tick-over!

nib

Yet when it does the UK has a properly designed energy system that can draw from alternative sources.

Spoken like a 'true green'.

Just because it has kept its coal and nuclear and gas going at great expense up till now is no guarantee that it always will

I’m not sure that belting down a motorway, with all those amps heating the battery, then plugging in to a 300kW charger that will also heat the battery, is a really good way of preserving battery life.

Actually belting down a motorway uses surprisingly little amps. Steady

Charging a 100kW pack up in ten minutes is way worse - 600kW

Trying to tow a caravan up a steep hill is probably even worse...

I though Teslas deliberately heat their battery pack when they know they're en-route to a fast charger?

I set my cruise cotrol to 63mph. Any faster and the battery gets easten up and the range drops significantly.

Coal is no longer:

Until such time as a decent storage solution comes about, and/or the state takes ownership of nuclear, that's what we're stuck with.

Dunno, but my Renault (which hasn't arrived yet) claims to have some sort of intelligence that can prepare it for a fast charge:

"battery pre-conditioning for DC charging" and "Google built-in, with battery preconditioning & route planning".

nib

Yes, you can indicate your plan to charge, and the pack, instead of being refrigerated, can rise to the correct temp for charging.

In the winter when motoring, the pack can be too cold for immediate fast charging, and conditioning may be required for a few minutes before the charging starts.

Any car with a heat pump, has some engineering to try to match the capacity of the heat pump, to the proposed situations at hand. There can be divergent needs for heating/cooling the cabin, and heating/cooling the battery, so the heat pump system needs valves and such, to suit all combinations.

It was the cars without heat pumps, that had poor attention to details. And that's why/how their batteries got damaged and the packs failed before the end of warranty.

There is a "proper temperature for best charging". And that's what the car aims for, and especially if you give it advanced warning.

And that's one of the complaints, about a BEV in a cold climate and charging at, say, 7kW. If it is really cold outside (-40C at my sisters place), some of the energy goes into the heat pump, to keep the battery warm enough, then the remaining kilowatts go into the pack.

A benefit of keeping the car plugged in, even when it is charged to the level of charge you requested, is you can tell the car "I will be departing at 8AM, please condition the car". And it can condition the pack (in a cold climate) or warm the cabin using mains electricity, so the initial ride is not making heavy usage of the battery to heat the cabin at the last minute. The lady next door would like this, because she would leave her ICE car running for 20 minutes or half an hour, before departure, so the cabin would be toasty warm.

The electric motors in a BEV, can also be part of the cooling loop, and especially if you have been doing burnouts. ( With expensive tyres, nobody does burnouts. )

Paul

Just as a matter of interest, what has the renewables programme cost to date? This would need to include the subsidies, the cost of upgrading the balancing grid we had with a (much bigger) supply grid, the expensive maintenance of the renewables generators, and the cost of the backup systems for those periods when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Which is why the UK should be granting new onshore and offshore gas production licences - with the proviso that all the gas produced must be offered to the UK at cost + a reasonable profit, rather than world market prices. If we are going to have to continue using gas for many years, we should be producing our own and isolating ourselves from volatile world markets.

Chevrolet Silverado EV: 400 Miles at 75 MPH 205.0-kWh battery took 58 minutes to go from 10 to 90 percent state of charge That's five hours driving, one hour rest. On my cross country jaunt of 5 .3 5 .3 5 in an ICE (15.6 hours), the BEV would do that in 17 Hours. 5 1 5 1 5

Mercedes EQS: 400 Miles at 75 MPH (single motor version)

The Rimac Nevara has a somewhat lower range. 120 kWh. 30 minute recharge. It's a flying brick too, but the size of rear contact patch likely extracts a penalty. 50 cars have been sold so far :-) That at least proves that money does not buy happiness.

The range then, depends somewhat on how you drive. More attention to aerodynamics helps. How the Silverado hit 400 miles, that's pretty strange when you consider the profile of the vehicle.

"At a drag coefficient of 0.331, the Silverado EV WT has one of the lowest drag coefficients of any available production full-size pickup truck"

The Model S drag coefficient is .208 Cd.

The Mercedes EQS drag coefficient is .20 . And then you need to drop some mass and friction via going single motor. A motor that is "off", it depends on the excitation method as to whether it presents drag or not.

On some dual-motor cars, the motors are different types and so the cruising is done on the efficient motor, leaving the other one off a lot of the time. There can also be a preference for which motor does the regen (switch on the excitation, collect the generated power).

Where does that leave the "cheap car" ?

It's well known, that a smaller car can be more economical on consumption, but without a decent sized battery pack, you can't get to 400 miles. It can't be a small car and hit 100 kWh. The slab would be too big.

A cheap car can still be used for a daily commute.

If you're parked in the street... a robot charger can charge your car, but I doubt the price is competitive with home charging. And there are lots of environments where a machine like that would be useless in its current form. This is a "California design", ready for rioters to spray paint and set on fire :-)